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Storypoints

02-13-2014, 12:11 PM

The Eternal City needs the conversion ratio for Story Points (SP) bumped considerably for this new SP purchase program to work. The current 1 SP = 2.5 role-points would have to become 1 SP = 20 Role-points for it be viable. No one (in terms of TEC players) with an ounce of sense will buy SP at the current ratio. I have disposable income and would like to buy SP... However, I could be premium and buy the maximum allotted SP for the month and have literally nothing to show for it besides $154.99 less in my bank account (750 rolepoints is not enough to buy a single stat increase or even count 1/2 way towards a custom item purchase). Also as posted in the TEC forums using SP to turn into RP to change the name of your dog would cost $100.

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The only way to make this work is to separate the currency for items you can pay2win and the items that do not affect mechanics.

Originally posted by glenh

Maybe a new 'general' skill called "wait". Which allows you to wait for boats/caravans etc. Each rank could give you a 1% chance not to miss it so at rank 100 you'd be best at catching the boats whilst AFK, and it would also provide a benefit to ranking it up.

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Here's my issue...you can spend $154 dollars to get a stat increase in TEC. Which is ridiculous in general. However, even if you don't spend the money to buy StP's. If you just paid for basic it'd take you 16 days of continuous log in and meeting the (poorly written) RP check. Or premium at 9 days of continuous log in. The item cost/real money cost is ridiculous.

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1. The first question is how do we determine the actual value of a StoryPoint? The original method was to compare the price of the StoryPoint to the only real world commodity we can purchase with StoryPoints; 1 free month of a Skotos subscription. Doing some simple math we know that one month of Skotos costs $12.95, or 300 StoryPoints. This means that 300 StoryPoints have a value of $12.95, which means 1 StoryPoint has a value of just over 4 cents based on that model (0.04316 repeating to be specific).

Using that model, 10 StoryPoints would cost 43 cents, but that was the old model in the innocent day before Skotos started selling StoryPoints directly. In reality we know that Skotos actually charges $5.95 for 10 StoryPoints, over a 1000% increase in dollar value per StoryPoint compared to what the old model suggests going just off what a free subscription month costs.

The value difference is to the point where it easily makes more sense to spend $12.95 on your Skotos sub and then put your hard earned StoryPoints into purchasing in-game benefits, than it does to spend those StoryPoints on free Skotos months at 1/10th of the value. It doesn't take a genius to notice this price difference, it's been pointed out countless times. And realistically speaking it's almost certainly intentional marketing on Skotos' part - and it makes sense. Skotos loses money every time you use StoryPoints on a free month of subscription, they don't lose money when you use StoryPoints to buy your character a nice hat.

The problem is that a lot of the community's StoryPoint prices were set based on the original model that 1 StoryPoint is worth 4 cents, and those prices never really changed when Skotos started directly selling StoryPoints a few years ago at 10x the price we assumed they were worth.

Perhaps what's really needed here is to remove altogether the option to spend StoryPoints on free Skotos months (I know, "boo" for all of us who have been living off StoryPoints for an age). This will be an unpopular decision for the many older players who use their excess StoryPoints to pay for their Skotos accounts, but it will give Skotos the freedom to toy with their StoryPoint pricing, and really it makes more sense now that Skotos is going in the direction of Freemium on all its games - the value of paying STPs to access the game is lessened now that you can already do that for free in most Skotos games.

2. Problem two is inflation. Skotos is now pushing on 19 years since its first game, Castle Marrach, came out of beta and players first started earning StoryPoints. In that time, long-term players have amassed thousands of StoryPoints, I've seen numbers pushing towards the five digit mark before. This presents two problems; the first is that any change to the value of StoryPoints inflicts a real world inflation change on the value of the StoryPoints already attached to accounts, which is significant when we bear in mind that Skotos is an official registered business. If today my StoryPoints are worth $100 and Skotos decides to cut the cost they charge for StoryPoints by 50%, my $100 dollars just became $50 of value, it's comparable to a stock market crash for shareholders.

One might argue that the way around this is that instead of decreasing the amount of dollars that Skotos charges per StoryPoint, we instead reduce how many StoryPoints we charge for commodities in our games. Using Marrach pricing as an example, if we're deciding that one "skill bump" should cost the equivalent of $10, we cut the amount of StoryPoints we charge for the skill bump from 75stps to 25stps instead of increasing the amount of StoryPoints we get for our $10 from 25 to 75. The end result is the same, my current $100 dollars of StoryPoints would cost someone $100 to obtain, but those StoryPoints go farther now, which makes Joe Blow happy that he can buy his skill bump for 1/5th of the price it would've cost him, and makes me happy because my already existing StoryPoints will likewise go farther, and it makes Skotos happy because people are buying more StoryPoints because they're worth more now.

The problem loops back to inflation, however. What was yesterday $100 worth of StoryPoints is now today the equivalent $500 worth of StoryPoints. What I mean by this is that since the cost of goods would have to drop so drastically in order to bring the current rate of storypoints-per-dollar to a reasonable level, that people who have excess StoryPoints could buy a lot with them.... a whole lot.

If I just learned that my 100 StoryPoints can buy 5x more stuff than it could yesterday, I'm going to want to go shopping, and what I can't spend I'll want to give to my friends so they can spend it. With this model we potentially run into a situation where there are so many excess StoryPoints in the market that there is no reason to buy them anymore. The only way I can see to address this would be to prohibit donating of StoryPoints to friends from here on. It is a decision that may be unpopular with a lot of people given how long standing the tradition of gifting STPs to our friends is, though honestly it's an entirely common policy in the online gaming world. In fact, outside of Skotos, I can't think of an online game today that allows you to donate your purchased virtual currency to another player's account without proving that you own both accounts. Blizzard, Zenimax, Sony, Microsoft, Bioware, none of these companies (to the best of my knowledge) allow you to donate your online currency with them to another player.

But what's the point? Well, what this would achieve is a guarantee that I, as a 15 year Skotos player, won't take my StoryPoints (which can now buy 5x as much stuff as it could yesterday due to the price drop for commodities) and give those unneeded StoryPoints to my friend so he can buy stuff with the excess I'll never spend, as opposed to him buying StoryPoints from Skotos himself. This ensures that despite the inflation we'll see if prices drop for virtual goods and services that there will still be a demand for StoryPoints in the community, and that demand will be supplied by buying them from Skotos. This still leaves the inflation problem for existing long time players; people who have been around for a decade will never want for STPs, but to be honest if you're in the Decade Club at this point you're probably never going to spend your remaining STPs on anything other than free months anyway unless you get bored and decide to roll a new character and deck them out with goodies. So long as longtime players are not allowed to bleed their excess STPs to other accounts this method may remain a viable solution.

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3. Problem three lies in the fact that StoryPoints are cross-game currency. In an ideal world, every Skotos game would use its own form of microtransaction currency, StoryPoints earned in Lazarus could not be used in TEC and so on.

Instead of the ideal, we're presented with a dilemma where every Skotos game uses a single shared online microtransaction currency, yet none of those games have linear, controlled StoryPoint markets. Where one game may charge you 30STP to change your character's eye colour, another game may charge 50STP for the same alteration and another game may charge 100STP. Some Skotos games give StoryPoints to volunteer Staff or players of VPs and NPCs, some do not, some give more than other games do. Some games hold art contests and other community events awarding large sums of StoryPoints, some games give certain services for free that are charged for in other games, and those StoryPoints made or saved can be acquired in one game at the expense of another. And by 'expense of' I mean that I can take the unspent 2000 StoryPoints I've been sitting on, acquired during my time in Castle Marrach, and go spend them on ICO, presenting the ICO Staff with a plethora of alterations and custom items that their game staff now has to take time to code - for someone who didn't earn those StoryPoints in ICO or contribute to ICO in any real way. If we drop the prices of STP purchases as suggested on 'point 2' above, those 2000stps become the equivalent of 10000stps; I could keep some poor ICO Staffer busy for quite awhile with 10000STP worth of purchases. Simply put, not every game is capable of keeping up with the current demand of STP purchases with the small volunteer staff groups most of us have to work with.

In order to deal with this dilemma, we would likely need to coordinate between the Hosts of the various Skotos games on what we're charging for services and what we're granting to players in terms of StoryPoints acquired outside of direct Skotos purchases and the bonus 50stps for a Premium account.

And/or...

We separate StoryPoints into a game-specific currency. StoryPoints in their raw form would be unusuable until converted into currency for a specific game, this way the StoryPoints you get directly from Skotos and all StoryPoints you already own can be used anywhere, but StoryPoints you get in a specific game have to be used in that specific game, and "raw" StoryPoints would have to be converted (using an in-game command) into microtransaction currency for that specific game before you can spend it. So you would buy your 50STPs from Skotos or get them via your Premium account, but before spending them in a game, you would have to convert them into game-specific virtual currency, whereas the StoryPoints you get for playing a VP/NPC in Marrach would already come to you as Marrach-specific virtual currency.

All in all, the TL;DNR solution I see here (maybe) is...

1. Keep the cost of STPs the same, but drastically drop the amount of STPs we charge for virtual goods and services.
2. Remove the ability to spend STPs on a free month of Skotos.
3. Remove the ability to transfer STPs to friends.
4. Find a way to govern how many points are granted/charged between different Skotos games, or break their currencies apart so they're not using the same form of virtual currency.

It's not altogether perfect, but it's the best way I can see to make StoryPoint purchases appealing to players without affecting the StoryPoint value of current StoryPoint holders and not causing Skotos to lose money. Admittedly I don't hold any marketing degree, I'm just applying some basic business and marketing principles here and it's a topic I've mulled on for awhile in regards to pushing CM's own Freemium program. Feel free to tear it open and expose flaws as you find them.